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After a year that saw the UNESCO World Heritage Convention celebrate its 40th anniversary, the most poignant takeaway may be the questions raised about UNESCO’s limitations when it comes to truly protecting World Heritage Sites.

Just days after Emma Cunliffe’s updated report on Syrian cultural heritage sites was posted to the Global Heritage Network (GHN) Community, NBC News interviewed Cunliffe and GHF’s Dr. Dan Thompson for a story about war-related damage to these sites.

Global Heritage Network (GHN) has posted a new report by Emma Cunliffe, author of the widely-cited “Damage to the Soul: Syria’s Cultural Heritage in Conflict” report, on the updated condition of Syria’s endangered cultural heritage. The update summarizes the current state of Syria’s six UNESCO World Heritage Sites, all of which Cunliffe relates have been damaged by shelling, fires, and/or looting.

Last year, for the first time since the Turkish War of Independence, a team of archaeologists returned to Karkemish, an ancient city on the Syria-Turkey border. Led by Nicolò Marchetti of Bologna University, the joint Italian-Turkish team recently finished its second season of excavations at the site, building on the work of British Museum teams that included T.E. Lawrence, who later became famous as “Lawrence of Arabia.”

When the World Heritage Convention was adopted by UNESCO in 1972, it became the first international treaty linking the concepts of nature conservation and preservation of cultural properties. Since then, while nearly 1,000 cultural and natural properties have enjoyed increased global publicity and protection as a result of the World Heritage label, the convention has also become increasingly scrutinized by developers and conservationists alike.

For generations of archaeologists, Karkemish has seemed like a dream site — both in terms of its huge archaeological potential as well as its elusiveness. Although the ancient city, referenced in the Bible, has always been well known by scholars, its location was a mystery until George Smith identified it in 1876. From then until 1920, a number of teams excavated the site, including a British Museum-funded team that involved T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), before war and conflict again put it out of reach.

Since the start of Syria’s civil war eighteen months ago, the country’s abundance of cultural heritage sites — which include some of the oldest and most important cultural centers on earth — have found themselves repeatedly caught in the crossfire. Archaeologists around the world have made devoted efforts to assess the damage, but actually protecting the sites has been impossible.

Amidst the brutal conflict in Syria that has killed thousands and thrown the country into disarray, one of the bright spots has been the emergence of a new voice in heritage conservation: Emma Cunliffe, a 2010 Global Heritage Preservation Fellow, whose efforts to document damage to Syria’s cultural heritage sites have been referenced by major media outlets across the world.

For the past week, news out of Syria has focused on the escalating conflict in Aleppo, where regime forces reportedly spent the weekend launching missiles from helicopters, while rebels fought back by aiming their own guns at the sky.

Since the violent uprising that erupted in Syria over a year ago, the country’s rich and complex cultural heritage has come under heavy fire. With few exceptions, archaeologists have been left merely to guess at the damage to these ancient sites. Now, however, thanks to a comprehensive report by Emma Cunliffe, a 2010 Global Heritage Preservation Fellow and current PhD researcher at Durham University, much more is known about the conflict-related damage suffered by Syria’s heritage sites.